University of Tennessee Athletics
Leaving it All on the Court
September 18, 2015 | Men's Basketball
By Tom Satkowiak, Associate Media Relations Director
This is a true story. But it's not a sad story.
At 24-years-old, Jeronne Maymon retired from professional basketball this week.
Did I mention this is not a sad story? Because Jeronne Maymon isn't defined by the things he accomplished on the basketball court.
However, since that's how most of you know him, let's start there.
Jeronne transferred to Tennessee from Marquette in January of 2009. I remember the first time I met him, when he and his parents visited Knoxville. They walked into practice at Thompson-Boling Arena, and at first glance I assumed he was a football recruit. But I was soon told that he was a two-time state Player of the Year in his native Wisconsin and that there was a good chance he'd soon become a Vol.
Shortly thereafter, he was enrolled. Per NCAA rules, he had to spend a full academic year at UT before he'd be eligible to suit up for games.
Prior to one of his first practices during that redshirt season, he was doing some conditioning work in Pratt Pavilion. I wanted to see what kind of shape he was in, so I made it a point to observe for a few minutes.
As I watched him struggle to hold a side plank for more than a few seconds, I remember thinking to myself, "It's a good thing he's got a year to get himself ready."
But it didn't take long to realize that he was determined to make the most of that year. Jeronne has never been afraid of hard work. That trait would serve him well a couple years down the road... but that's later in the story.
Jeronne finally made his Tennessee debut at Charlotte on Dec. 17, 2010. That 2010-11 season didn't turn out how he'd hoped. Though the Vols made the NCAA Tournament, his contribution to that year's team was limited to 2.6 points and 2.8 rebounds in fewer than 10 minutes per game off the bench.
"As a player, I was always strong minded and confident in my skills," he said. "I always knew my time would come. But after that season, I had to humble myself. If I didn't, it would only get worse.
"I came in cocky, expecting to play big minutes. That's the reason I left Marquette. I wasn't humble, and I thought I was supposed to be playing 20 or 30 minutes as a freshman. But the skill level that I had in front of me… Lazar Hayward, Jimmy Butler, those were guys in front of me who went on to get drafted. I thought I was just as talented. So after that first season at Tennessee, where I still didn't play the role I thought I was supposed to play, I really had to do a self-check and re-evaluate. So I humbled myself."
During off-season workouts leading up to his junior year in 2011-12, it was clear that he was finally starting to find his groove. We had a lot of talent on that squad — including three future NBA Draft picks. And on most days during live scrimmage work in Pratt Pavilion, Jeronne was unstoppable.
Breaking the Press: "His ball-handling was a huge help," Josh Richardson said. "He was a versatile power forward, and most forwards guarded him full court. So he made it easy on us guards."
You see, even though he was built like a defensive end (6-8, 260) and he was strong as an ox, he went through a phase earlier in his basketball career during which he thought he was a guard. And though some smart guidance from his coaches eventually helped him to realize he was more Karl Malone than John Stockton, that "phase" honestly may have helped his development.
No, he wasn't a Cousy Award candidate, but he had a decent handle, especially for a guy his size. He could flash high and take big men off the dribble. He had developed a soft touch from 15-feet and in. And I know his teammates will attest to the fact that whenever we played a pressing team, they felt more comfortable if he was on the floor to help bring the ball across half court.
So once Jeronne came to accept his role in the post, the fact that he possessed some skill along the perimeter made him awfully difficult to contain.
For proof, go to YouTube and look up the highlights from Tennessee's double-overtime thriller against Memphis at the 2011 Maui Invitational.
He finished with 32 points and 20 rebounds. It was just the sixth 30-20 effort in school history.
"Ridiculous" is how teammate Jordan McRae described Jeronne's performance that day in paradise.
"I'll never forget it," McRae added. "Jeronne was a bully out there, and Memphis didn't have an answer for him. We didn't have our best day as a team, but Jeronne did all he could to put us on his back and carry us."
We had to play again the very next day, so that night — and into the morning — our coaches were hard at work putting together a scouting report in the team banquet room at our hotel.
I was sitting there with the staff that evening when one of them received a text message from a highly-touted recruit in Memphis, Tennessee. The prospect had texted to say how impressed he was by Jeronne's dominant performance.
"I want to play with him," read the text from Jarnell Stokes.
Energizer: Maymon's intensity on the court set the tone for his Tennessee teammates throughout his career.
Just a few weeks later, they were teammates. The duo now ranks first and second atop Tennessee's all-time leaderboard for offensive rebounding. They combined for 54 career double-doubles and are undoubtedly the most prolific rebounding tandem in program history.
That magnificent Memphis game set the stage for what would be a monster season for Jeronne. He garnered second-team All-SEC acclaim after averaging 12.7 points and 8.1 rebounds. In SEC play, he increased his scoring output to a team-best 14.2 points per game. He led the Vols in scoring eight times, rebounding 15 times and steals 11 times. He also logged eight double-doubles, doing so against the likes of Anthony Davis, Terrence Jones, Patric Young and Murphy Holloway.
Jeronne was in full beast mode.
But one of the unfortunate aspects of sport is that far too often an elite athlete is betrayed his or her own body.
In Jeronne's case, that betrayal manifested itself in two bad knees.
The left knee broke down first. During Tennessee's overtime win at LSU on Feb. 29, 2012, he tore his left meniscus.
Incredibly, he was able to keep playing on it — in fact he started and logged 34 minutes vs. Vanderbilt three days later. But the pain worsened with every passing day. He persevered through the SEC Tournament, at times unable to hide his limp. Nevertheless, it didn't stop him from pulling down 17 rebounds (10 offensive boards) against Ole Miss in New Orleans.
The Vols landed in the NIT for the postseason, but he finally found himself sidelined for the team's opening-round game against Savannah State. Tennessee advanced and had a five-day layoff before its second-round contest. He came off the bench in that game and scrapped his way to a gutsy 17 points and seven rebounds.
Surgery a few days later preceded several weeks of rehab alongside team athletic trainer Chad Newman and UT's world-class medical staff.
Rehab went well, and Jeronne was cleared to return to the court shortly before a trip home to Wisconsin in May. But while he was back home, he began noticing swelling in his other knee.
When he was examined upon to returning to Knoxville, it was revealed that he now had a right meniscus tear as well as articular cartilage damage in that same knee.
So it was back to the operating table, and then back to another grueling rehab regimen for the rest of the summer. In July, Tennessee began preparing for its August exhibition tour of Italy. Jeronne was cleared to return to practice, but days before the flight to Europe, his right knee started to swell again.
Though he made the trip with the team, he was extremely limited during the tour. Constant treatment wouldn't reduce his swelling, so he underwent arthroscopic surgery in the fall. That examination revealed that he was developing a degenerative knee (more articular cartilage damage). There were literally "loose bodies" floating around his knee.
Sometimes even the best medical care and the most comprehensive rehab plans encounter stumbling blocks. It's nobody's fault. The human body is, simply put, the most complex creation in the universe. No two are exactly alike, and each body reacts to and recovers from invasive procedures in different ways.
Thus, Jeronne's rehab was met with setback after setback.
One of the most daunting of those setbacks was the onset of infection in the right knee. On multiple occasions, medical staffers drained more than 50 CCs of fluid out from around the joint.
The infection meant doctors had to open up Jeronne's knee — yet again — and clean everything out.
"My low point was probably after that third surgery, after I got the infection," he said. "That really got me down and depressed. I called my mom a few times crying. I just didn't understand why this was happening to me. I wasn't trying to question God, I was just trying to put it all in perspective and make sense of the things that were happening in my life. I was always striving to be a good person, a leader, someone who tried to lift people up and push people to their highest level. So I didn't understand why these bad things were happening to me. I felt like I had another level I was capable of reaching as a player, but I kept getting hurt."
For close to a month, Newman administered IV antibiotics every single day.
"Chad treated me like a son. He was always with me. Our bond is forever forged. We'll be close and will keep in touch forever because we spent so much time together and went through so much. He would bathe me — it's crazy. But there was a period where I couldn't do it on my own. Chad and everyone around me kept reassuring me that I was going to be OK. And they were right."
But Jeronne would require constant rehab for the rest of his Tennessee career.
"We had to perform multiple procedures on his right knee, and each time you do that, the rehab becomes more and more difficult," Newman recalled. "At that point, your rehab becomes just as challenging mentally as it is physically. A guy like Jeronne wants to be out there with his teammates. It's just a really tough situation.
"Even with those multiple setbacks, Jeronne brought his lunch pail every day and continued to work hard. Some days were better than others, but he really had a workmanlike approach throughout the process."
Jeronne remains thankful for the constant barrage of support his Tennessee basketball family provided.
Helping Hands: Teammates, trainers, coaches and managers provided Maymon with support every step of the way. "We always knew he was going to make it back," Armani Moore said. "He was a competitor."
"The student managers – guys like Johnny Paul (Cole) and Kyle (Condon) – they were always calling and texting me to make sure I was OK," he said. "They'd send me text messages telling me I was a beast and that I was going to get back to dominating the SEC. It was really motivating knowing all those guys had my back.
"And the medical staff did everything in their power to help me get back. Dr. (Chris) Klenck, Dr. (Russell) Betcher, Chad, the whole UT staff all had a hand in helping me get me back on my feet. The rehab was always difficult for me, but they kept reassuring me that I'd get through it. They always made sure I was comfortable at the pace we were going. They had to push me to my limit, but they always took care of me as a person.
"If I had to through it all again, I would definitely choose those guys as the ones to look after me."
Jeronne began his Big Orange career on a course to celebrate Senior Day on March 9, 2013, with classmates Kenny Hall, Skylar McBee, Dwight Miller and Rob Murphy. But due to that ornery right knee of his, he was forced to watch from the sidelines that season.
"Jeronne was one of the first people who showed me how to be a real leader," former teammate and current Miami Heat guard Josh Richardson said. "Even when he was out for a year, he was still our team leader because he was so vocal."
Thank goodness for medical redshirts, because his alternate route to Senior Day one year later on March 8, 2014, led to a very "sweet" destination. More on that shortly.
A bit earlier I referenced Jeronne's work ethic. Well, that was on full display in the summer of 2013.
Our sports publicity staff produced a series of storytelling music videos that summer, each one centered around a member of the basketball team. Jeronne's video focused on his latest rehab regimen.
I wanted to use a symbol of some kind in the video to serve as a metaphor for Jeronne's setbacks. That symbol ended up being a 7-foot-long, red-tailed boa constrictor named Soco.
Jeronne didn't like Soco.
Apparently, as Kryptonite is to Superman, massive serpents are to Jeronne. In the boiler room bowels of Thompson-Boling Arena, we wrapped one end of Soco around his leg and the draped the other end over his shoulders.
"Just keep that thing away from my face," Jeronne said repeatedly (and quite sternly).
Filming for that scene didn't last very long, but we got the shots we needed. Then Jeronne got the heck out of there.
Shooting that video with Jeronne was a fun precursor to a fun season. It was a season that saw him average 9.7 points and 8.1 rebounds while shooting 53 percent and starting 36 of 37 games.
He was the team's heart that year. He was a calming presence when the Vols faced adversity in games. He was a motivating presence when practices lacked the necessary enthusiasm. And he was a demoralizing presence to opposing player whose chests and ribs had to absorb the impact of his powerful shoulders during car-crash collisions in the paint.
He didn't have the same bounce he once had. And though we could see his grimaces at times, he never used his aching knees as a reason to give anything less than max effort every second he was on the court.
His name appeared on mock draft boards following his junior season, but now, as a fifth-year senior with two bum knees, the NBA was no longer a possibility.
His Tennessee career ended in the Sweet Sixteen on March 28, 2014, just two points short of the Elite Eight. The attendance of 41,072 that packed Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis that day ranks as the largest crowd the Vols have ever played in front of. He went out in style.
Off the Court: While he was sidelined during the 2013 Spring semester, Maymon took 18 credit hours and posted an impressive 3.34 GPA. He received his Psychology degree on May 9, 2014.
But he did have one more shining moment in Thompson-Boling Arena. It came on May 9, 2014, when he walked across the stage as a Tennessee graduate during a spring commencement ceremony that he shared with McRae – his teammate and brother.
The old, wise bull still had a shot to play at the professional level, and he spent the 2014-15 season with Hapoel Tel Aviv B.C. in Israel.
The game of basketball had taken Jeronne all over the world: Maui, The Bahamas, Italy, Puerto Rico, Israel.
He returned to Knoxville this summer and, you guessed it, underwent yet another surgery — while in Israel he had developed a meniscal cyst in that Frankenstein right knee of his.
After that surgery, in a testament to his confidence in UT's training staff, he spent time rehabbing with Newman and training with basketball strength and conditioning coach Garrett Medenwald to prepare for another contract overseas.
"The great thing about working with Jeronne was you could tell how much he loved the game of basketball," Medenwald said. "Every day we trained together, I could feel that passion."
Last month, Jeronne signed with the Hiroshima Dragonflies and added a stamp from Japan to his passport. Unfortunately, his time in Japan was short lived.
I let the sadness creep in for just a moment on Sept. 7 when Jeronne revealed in a text message that his knees were in a lot of pain and that he thought the club may cancel his contract.
But then I remembered who Jeronne Maymon really is. He's hardly defined by hoops.
"I came to terms with this a while ago," he said. "I heard Peyton Manning say recently, 'Play until you suck.' That kind of made me chuckle because it had gotten hard for me. Both of my knees have been hurting pretty bad. But I kept going out there and giving my all – that's the way I play.
"But I finally came to the realization that I would rather stop playing basketball then go through another surgery and rehab. I don't want to struggle to walk later in life. I want to be able to run around and play with my kids one day and do active things. I'm still pretty young. But my body… I don't want to go out there and embarrass myself.
"That's not the player I am."
Jeronne is one of the fiercest competitors I've ever seen. He's incredibly compassionate and has a generous heart. He's a great communicator. He'll never be outworked. He's holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Tennessee.
And he boarded a flight home to the United States on Wednesday.
So after you read this story, don't feel sad for Jeronne.
"I'm happy moving on," he said. "I'm ready to focus on whatever comes next in life. I'm at a good place right now."
